about a dream: Salzburg!!

Since Anne's hip replacement was postponed, we decided to head off to Salzburg for the weekend. It was so beautiful! We decided to again take the train. The girls really prefer the train, and the cost is the same as driving (thanks to our awesome family rail pass!), so train it was.

We took an 8:30 train and were in Salzburg by noon. After checking in to our hotel and playing with my little ponies for a bit we headed out to explore the city. Ok, we had to drag the girls out. They would be totally happy to just ride on the train and stay in hotels all day. They don't mind a little sightseeing, but they would be happy to dispense with it. Well, we have a trick worked out: we starve them out of the room! Ha ha ha! Evil genius.

Actually, all 4 of us were starving, so the first thing we did was find a restaurant and order the family platter.

We have a new policy about always ordering the family platter (with a side of fries!). They're enormous and so, so good. This one had schnitzel, pork with gravy, venison stew, potatoes and dumplings. So delicious.

Then we continued our exploration. It was overcast and cool, but not cold, and we ended up finding this narrow little flight of stairs. We went up. It turned a corner, then up, then another corner. Before we realized it, we were half way up the mountain to the castle, and we decided what he heck, we'll walk all the way up. There was a funicular we could have taken ("I want to take the funiclear!" Maggie whined. Pronounced fun-ick-lee-er. Cute!)

Eventually we got to the castle. What a view from up there!!

Unfortunately, the camera ran out of batteries, so we only got a few photos. It was getting dark anyway though.

Oh, a funny I almost forgot: If you looked to the right of where Nick and the girls are standing, you'd see some beautiful mountains. We spent some time just enjoying the view, and at one point I started to sing:
"The hills are alive..."
and Nina continued, in the same melody,
"No! They are not.."
Ha! What a funny kid!

After some more dinner, we went back to the hotel and passed out. That castle was really high, it must have been the equivalent of at least 30 flights of stairs! WHY must they always build these castles on hilltops? If I lived back then, I'd say no way. Well, the good news is that the beds were super comfy and we all passed out and slept wonderfully.

After breakfast in the morning (free breakfast is a must for us, even if it's just a cold European breakfast) we went to mass at one of the 50 churches in Salzburg. Ok not 50, but you can't throw a stone in that city without hitting another church. You wouldn't think you'd need so many, but there it is.

I don't have any pictures of the inside of the church we chose (which I believe was called the Franziskanerkirche or Franciscan church), but it was strange. It appeared to be an absolutely lovely Gothic style church that got an incomplete Baroque facelift.

Here's a photo I found online. It's got a funny fish-eye effect going on, but you can see what I'm talking about:

See how at the very bottom it's got a Baroque addition, plus a very obviously added-on Baroque altar, but then it's Gothic the rest of the way up? Very strange. Maybe they'd have had more money for a complete facelift if they didn't have 49 other churches to divide the money between.

How petty of me to complain. We only got about a third of the way through mass before Maggie had to go to the bathroom, so that was that. Oh well, we tried.

It was a much sunnier day, so we took some more pictures: